Museo del Oro

One of the great things about Sunday in Colombia is that museums are free. I decided to go to the Museo del Oro (Gold Museum) to take in some pre-Colombian jewelry and learn a thing or two. This museum is impressive. There is a good pace and flow to how they present the information and it's not overwhelming. You can easily spend a few hours there and not even realize it. It starts with explaining how older civilizations extracted, refined and transformed the various metals they found, such as copper, silver, platinum and gold. It then shows tools of the metalsmith trade and how they created intricate designs with each metal. It then dives into the importance of various metals and the people who wore them, especially village chiefs, priests and shamans. They describe the beliefs about the balance in the world, animals, man, the underworld, middle world and upper world. All sorts of interesting things. But of course, there was a lot of gold and ancient relics. You enter this part of the museum through two vault doors!

Pottery with intricate designs

The following items are only about 2-3 inches (4-6cm) in length, but the detail and craftsmanship is amazing. 

This is one expensive necklace. 

The traditional dress of a typical woman and a shaman of the time. 

Woman

Shaman

Finally, what I thought was the best piece in the entire museum. It's a depiction of a high priest and other priests on a raft in a lake offering gold and emeralds back to the earth. They would do this when there was an imbalance in their tribe, either a disease running wild, crops not growing or something else. They believed by giving the earth back her produce, they would restore the balance.